Suppressing a retch, he leaped to the ground and fled down the passage.
These were once human? he asked himself when his stomach had settled and he had slowed from a run to a jog. Or are they still human despite what they've become?
And where does Jon the tery fit in?
No answers came.
He arrived at the central pool, a stagnant body of water fed by a slow underground spring. Something on the far side lapped briefly at the pristine smoothness of the water's surface, then scuttled away.
It was dark in this region. Perhaps the excess moisture had a deteriorative effect on the phosphorescence. Whatever the cause, it made finding the door Tlad had described more difficult.
Jon began scouting the water's edge, looking for a rock wall with a door in it. He found it almost by accident — had he not been dragging his left hand against the rock as he searched he would have passed without noticing it. But his fingers felt a long vertical groove and he stopped to inspect.
The notched handle was there. So were the three studs.
Water rippled behind him. He turned and saw nothing at first other than a bubbling disturbance at the center of the otherwise flawless surface. Another ripple and he spotted something floating on — no, rising from the pool. He could not make out the shape and did not care to. Whatever it was, it did not wish him well — not here in the Hole.
Brushing off the studs, he quickly tapped in the code: 1-3-1-3-2-3-1-2,then grabbed for the notch. The door stayed firm. He tried the code again and still no result.
A glance over his shoulder showed something monstrously huge rising from the pool, looming over him. He tried the sequence again but the door wouldn't budge. He was frantically beating his fist against it when Tlad's words came back to him:
Don't forget to clear.
Jon hit all three buttons at once, tapped in the sequence, and pulled.
It moved.
Dust, dirt, and pebbles powdered him as he dropped his club, thrust both hands into the notch, placed his left foot against the wall, and pulled with desperate strength. He didn't have to look behind now — moist air from the formless behemoth's cold wet surface was wafting around him as it reared over him.
The door suddenly jerked open and he fell back against something cold and soft and slimy, then he catapulted himself into the opening, pulling the door behind him. It closed only half way. Fallen debris was jamming it open. The creature outside, however, solved the problem for him by lumbering against the door and forcing it closed with its weight.
The room seemed to sense Jon's presence. Panels in the ceiling began to glow, adding to the luminescence in the walls. Jon tried to gather his wits. Innumerable crates lined the walls and stood in long rows before him. Where to begin?
After a brief rest — this was the first time since leaving Tlad that he felt safe enough to let down his guard — he started with the pile on his left and moved along the wall, tearing open the crates with his hands. Some held books, others drawings and pictures, but most of the contents were totally incomprehensible to him. More things he didn't understand.
So many things he didn't understand.
Tlad was one. Why did he trust that man? He had lied to everyone he’d met here. Tlad wasn't his real name… he did not come from the coast…he was not a potter.
Why trust a liar?
Tlad had spent days talking to Jon, trying to explain where he came from and why he was here. All Jon could glean from the monologues was that he came from far away and wanted to help the Talents and all other teries.
Why? Did he have reasons he wasn't telling? Had he lied to Jon about his intentions as he had lied about his name?
But Tlad had talked to Jon, treated him as a man, truly seemed to think of him as one. Because of that, Jon would do almost anything for Tlad…even aid him in deceiving Rab and the Talents by destroying the weapons instead of bringing them back.
Tlad said it was for the best and Jon believed him.
Eventually he found the bombs. Crates of them, all neatly stacked against a wall: egg shaped as Tlad had said, with a smooth, shiny surface.
These could kill? These could destroy the Hole and Mekk's fortress as well? It did not seem possible. But he had trusted Tlad this far…
He needed only one. He cupped this in his palm and returned to the door. Pressing his ear against its smooth metal surface he listened for signs of activity outside. All quiet. The door moved easily at his touch and he stepped back as it swung outward. Nothing but the narrow path and a smooth expanse of water awaited.
The inhabitant of the lake was gone.
The lights in the cache room dimmed slowly as he exited and were fully extinguished by the time the door clicked shut behind him. He looked down and saw his club where he had dropped it. It was covered with slime — everything was covered with slime. Wiping the handle of the weapon clean against the fur on his leg, he followed the slime trail along the edge of the pool and noted that it wandered off into the passage he had planned on taking back to Tlad.
He changed his plans. Despite the fact that the path in question was the one that had brought him here and the only one he knew, and despite the fact that his greatest fear in the Hole was to become lost, he decided to take another route.
He would trust his sense of direction on a strange path more than he would trust his club against the dark behemoth from the pool.
The new passage was not very much different from the other and he made good time, loping along on his hind legs with the bomb cradled in his left hand against his chest, his club swinging back and forth in his right.
Then trouble.
Rounding a bend in the passage he ran into a pack of nine or ten spider-things.
Without hesitation they were on him with howls of fury, their clawed arms raking at him, their sharp teeth in their all-too-human faces snapping at him. Jon shook them off and backed away, swinging his club sparingly but with telling effect, always keeping it menacingly before him.
After the initial assault, the gang kept its distance, trying to flank him or work one of its members behind him. Jon kept backpedaling, holding them before him, wondering how long he could keep this up.
Suddenly he felt stone against his back and nowhere to go. He had allowed them to corral him into a dead-end branch of the passage. His gut writhed as he glanced around. They had him boxed in. He was trapped.
He looked up and saw the dark mouth of a small cave just out of reach above him. He could climb there easily, but it would mean turning his back on the gang of spider-things, and he didn't dare do that.
Then they attacked in earnest — a suicide charge on three levels with some leaping for his legs, others for his arms, and others for his head. Whirling and swinging his club, kicking when opportunity presented, Jon managed to hold them off for a moment or two, then one of them sank his teeth into his leg.
Jon twisted and lost his balance. He went down on one knee. As the gang swarmed over him, their teeth and claws tearing at him, their loathsome black bodies pressing against him, Jon felt himself start to fall onto his back. He dropped his club and raised his right arm for balance, searching for support, anything to keep him upright. For if they got him down on the ground –
Powerful fingers closed about his wrist.
With a force that threatened to pull his arm from its socket, he was lifted partly free of his attackers. He kicked them off as he was hauled into the air and unceremoniously dumped into the cave above. He whirled, ready to face a threat worse than that below, and was startled to see the mother monster he had aided earlier.
She hissed and pushed him behind her, then returned her attention to the furious spider gang below. As they swarmed up the wall, she sat back and waited. As soon as one poked its head inside the cave mouth, she punched at it with one of her huge fists. Her arms worked like battering rams. She seemed to be enjoying herself.
Jon would have helped her but he had lost his club. With a spasm of shock he realized he
’d lost the egg as well. He must have dropped it during the melee. He’d have to go back to the cache for another. He shuddered at the prospect. But he’d worry about that later. Right now he needed a weapon.
As he looked around for something else to use against the attackers, he came across the corpse of one of the spider-things slain earlier. The mother's young were clustered around it, nibbling.
Jon noticed a shaft of light toward the rear of the cave. Curious, he stepped over the younglings’ grisly feast and went to investigate. The tunnel curved sharply upward but the light ahead proved an irresistible lure. He climbed swiftly.
He found a break slightly smaller than his head in the back wall of the cave. Light poured through it — not the sickly phosphorescent glow that permeated the Hole, but a brighter, cleaner, familiar light.
Sunlight.
Jon put his face to the opening and peered through. He found he was looking into a large vertical shaft with sheer, smooth, unblemished walls. From above where the sunlight filtered down, a gong clanged and a man began screaming. By leaning his shoulder against the wall, he found he could twist his neck and see to the top of the shaft. A heavy iron grate covered the opening. Above that was blue sky and a ring of humans.
The grate rose and a naked, struggling, terrified man was brought to the edge. His arms were tied behind him; his screaming had stopped, reduced now to pitiful whimpering. A voice was speaking in measured tones, the words indistinct, perhaps praying, perhaps reading a sentence…
Something unsettlingly familiar about that voice…
When it stopped, the man began screaming again. The two troopers holding him gave a powerful shove and he fell free with wildly flailing legs and a cry of utter despair and terror that followed him all the way down the shaft, ending abruptly in a chorus of growls and scuffles from the waiting Hole dwellers below. Jon could not see the floor of the shaft. He did not want to.
He watched instead the vulpine faces of the troopers as they squinted into the dimness below, trying to catch some of the more grisly details of their ex-prisoner's fate. When another face joined them in peering over the edge, Jon felt his hackles rise.
He knew this man. Ghentren, the captain from Kitru's keep.
Suddenly, all the grief, the anguish, the rage, the pain came rushing back. Not that they had faded away, but somehow his close association with Tlad and the Talents has eased them to the back of his mind, layered them over with a soothing salve, and hidden them under clean dressings. He had thought he was healing, but knew now that nothing had healed. The heat from those festering, suppurating wounds was more intense than ever.
He could hear his teeth grinding of their own accord. He wanted Captain Ghentren's blood as much as ever. The balance craved restoration…
…and would have it!
Jon pulled back from the opening and pondered the situation. He could not get to Ghentren on his own. He would need Tlad's help. But how to get it?
The mother creature awaited him with her brood clustered about her. The spider gang was gone — either driven off or finally and forcefully convinced of the futility of trying to gain entrance to the cave. She pressed back against the wall to let him pass and hissed as he did so.
Jon kept his distance and tensed when he saw her reach for something on the floor. But she was only picking up one of the dead spider-thing's legs. She offered it to him once more.
Jon steeled himself and took it from her.
She bared her teeth at him. If it was a smile, it was a ghastly attempt. But in her eyes he thought he detected a sadness that he had to go. Perhaps loneliness was the greatest horror in the Hole.
Jon waved and quickly made his exit, leaving her alone in her little cave with her brood. As he climbed down the wall toward the floor, he realized that if, as Tlad had said, the Shapers had intended the Hole to be peopled by creatures from who every shred of human decency had been removed, they had failed. The mother creature was proof: A favor had not been forgotten, nor allowed to go unrepaid. Amid all this depravity, a spark of fellowship could still glow.
Reaching the floor, Jon paused to get his bearings and noticed two dead spider gang members at the foot of the wall. His club lay between them, untouched — he guessed the hands of the spider-things were not built to wield such a weapon. He kicked one over and sighed with relief when he saw the death egg.
As he hefted it in his hand he realized the egg was the key to assuring Tlad’s help.
Jon made his way out of the cul-de-sac and back down the passage toward the doorway to the observation corridor, toward safety.
When he neared his destination, Jon halted and searched the softly glowing dirt and rock that lined the walls on either side. He located a loose stone at eye level and pried it out. After scraping out a small hollow, he placed the bomb within and pressed the stone back over it, then stepped back and surveyed his work. Satisfied with the job of concealment, he turned and ran the rest of the way back to Tlad.
— XXIV-
"He made it!" Dalt shouted to the empty corridor when he saw Jon's familiar form break from a pile of stony rubble and race toward him.
He jumped back from the window and dashed into the lock. Grabbing the wheel, he spun it until the locking bars slid free of the door, then pulled it open. Jon leaped through and helped him close it after him.
"Thank the Core you're all right," he said.
It was all he could do to keep from hugging this big, bearish youth. All the while Jon had been gone Dalt had imagined a thousand gruesome deaths and had sworn never to forgive himself if anything happened to him in there.
But now it was over and the tery didn't look any worse for the wear — no, wait a minute — blood on his face, neck, and back…
"You're hurt?"
"Just scratches," Jon said in his growly voice. He was breathing easily, evenly as he stood there. "Only hurt a little."
"Did you find the cache?"
Dalt sensed an odd tension in Jon. "Yes. Found it. Found the bombs — many of them."
"Well…where is it?"
An instant of hesitation. "Out there."
"You dropped it?"
"I hid it."
Dalt was baffled. "Explain, Jon."
The tery quickly recounted what and whom he had seen in the air shaft. He concluded by telling Dalt what he now desired most in life.
"Captain Ghentren must die."
"Oh, he'll die all right," Dalt assured him. "Everyone up there — Mekk, the priests, the troopers — they'll all go when that one bomb sets off the others."
"No. You do not understand. He must not die without knowing. He must realize that his death restores a balance that he upset when he came to my home and killed my parents. He must know that before he dies."
"It's called vengeance, Jon," Dalt said slowly. "And you've certainly got some coming — generations' worth. But the bombs will provide that with interest."
"No," the tery repeated. "You do not understand. That captain must —"
"He must squirm and plead and beg before you kill him? Is that what you mean? Is that what you want? You want to sink to the level of his tactics, is that it?"
Struck by the vehemence of Dalt's voice, Jon stiffened but made no reply.
"You're better than that, Jon. Rab told me how you killed Dennel and Kitru, but that was different — that was when you were trapped in the middle of hostile territory."
"Yes. And because of men like the captain, the whole world is hostile territory to my kind."
"That may be, but what you're talking about now is not like you. It's cold-blooded and not worthy of you." His voice softened. "You may not know it, Jon, but there's something noble and good and decent about you. People sense it. That's why they like you. This Captain Ghentren is scum, no better and no worse than the others up there who do Mekk's bidding. Don't dirty your hands on him."
"But the balance —"
"Blast the balance! The bombs will take care of that!"
"No."
The note of irrevocable finality in the tery's voice brought Dalt's arguments to an abrupt halt. "The bomb will not be replaced in the cache until I have seen the parent-slayer's blood on my hands."
"And now blackmail," Dalt said in a low whisper. "You learn fast, don't you?"
He ached inside as he faced Jon. The poor fellow had been through so much in such a short time. His home, his security, his very identity had been shattered. His world had begun to spin wildly out of control when Ghentren's men spilled his parents' blood, and something within him clung desperately to the belief that all would be set on an even keel again by the captain’s death.
"What do you want me to do?" Dalt said, watching innocence crumble before him.
"Find Ghentren," the tery rasped. "There is still daylight left and you can go above in the fortress and find out where he sleeps."
"And then what?"
"I will visit him tonight and restore the balance."
"You can't even get into the fortress, let alone kill an officer."
"I can. And I will. Then I will return and replace the death egg after you have done what you must do to it."
Dalt considered his options and found he had none. He was bound by the Cultural Survey Service regulations to work within the technological stratum of the society under observation, but that wasn't holding him back now. It was the Hole. It stood between him and the solution to this mess. He stared though the window at the unending nightmare. If he thought he had the slightest chance of surviving in there he'd go himself. But only a full Defense Force combat rig would get him through the Hole alive, and he hadn't brought one along.
He could abort the entire mission. But that was tantamount to handing all those weapons directly over to Mekk, for sooner or later the Overlord would find a way to get to them. And that would be the end of the Talents and anything else that dared to deviate from what the True Shape sect declared the norm on this world.
Damn the Fed and damn the CS Service. Why couldn't they establish a protectorate?
The Tery lf-5 Page 12
